Google Zero is slightly misunderstood. The problem is not that Google is nefarious in no longer sending traffic to your website. (They probably don’t care very much one way or the other.) The real problem is you’ve depended on Google for your business. You’ve been obsessed w...

Good perspective from Om Malik on Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligence post and similar past statements:

Most CEOs defend their existing moats. Zuckerberg systematically abandons them. He understands that Facebook’s real asset isn’t the blue app. Instead, it is the graph of human attention and relationships.

As I’ve written about before, Mark is pretty good at what he does, and it’s just a shame that he’s dedicated his company to ads, attention, and AI slop.

In Mark Zuckerberg’s post today about superintelligence, I assume we’re getting a glimpse of the pitch he used to hire AI researchers away from other companies:

We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.

This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.

John Gruber blogging about the app Tea that is near the top of the App Store despite security problems:

I strongly suspect that, although Google hasn’t removed Tea from the Play Store, they’ve delisted it from discovery other than by searching for it by name or following a direct link to its listing. That both jibes with what I’m seeing on the Play Store top lists, and strikes me as a thoughtful balance between the responsibilities of an app store provider.

This is a great way to handle it if true. Developers (like users on social media) are not guaranteed amplification by an algorithm.

Lobby aquarium fish.

I got out of all stocks last year. If we had money to burn, I might invest in Figma. Seems like they’ve got things figured out. But also there’s too much hype around anything in the tech industry. Established companies will be fine. OpenAI will be fine. Everyone else, who knows. 💸

The Onion: Historians Confirm Lewis And Clark Set Out On Expedition To Justify Purchase Of Expensive Camping Equipment:

You can imagine how, if you had just blown the equivalent of $80,000 in today’s money on a keelboat you didn’t need, you too might feel stupid not taking it out on the river.

🤣

This special edition of Tigana looks beautiful. I can’t justify the price, but I would like to get a hardcover version one day, to go with my old paperback. It’s a favorite I haven’t read in forever.

I’ve been pulled in different directions lately and have a lot to catch up. But I did write some code today. Also working on something that uses ID.me, which I’ll hopefully announce tomorrow if they approve my OAuth access. Argh, gatekeepers!

Maybe it’s been too long since I’ve seen Downton Abbey, but I like The Gilded Age even more. Great balance between the different characters' stories and also the train business, which I love.

I’ll start with this quote from Mike Rockwell’s blog: I’ve been a happy Linode customer for years, but they experienced an outage Sunday morning that took my Cloudron server offline, impacting my Mastodon and Pixelfed instances. As of this writing they’re still offline and ...

Released a minor update to Micro.blog for Mac today. Little tweaks mostly for the new macOS beta. For better or worse, I’m doing all my work and testing on Tahoe now, and I expect it to be widely adopted in the fall.

I don’t agree with much of Casey Handmer’s politics, but I do like his fantastical vision of new cities. I’ve bought into the idea of using cheap solar for water desalination. It could transform areas of the world that don’t have enough water. We need to think bigger.

Cool to see expanded book management options in the next Micro Social beta.

Finished reading: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson. I read the e-book, but I also got the print edition in the mail yesterday. Half of the book is white text on black pages! I’ve never seen this before in a novel. 📚

After hours of downtime with our primary photo storage, I’ve given up on Linode and started restoring failed uploads and switching to our S3 backup. Very disappointing. I’ll post a final update to @news when everything is back online. I also learned some new things to make this more robust.

Feels like every day for a month I’ve been waking up to one emergency or another — some real, some fabricated. This morning, there was a power outage at a Linode data center that is affecting our photo hosting. Blah.

The new Billy Joel documentary — And So It Goes — on HBO was great. They had so much time to go deep on a lot of things. I actually knew next to nothing about him except the songs.

Did you know that you can open Bluesky starter packs in Micro.blog and follow people directly? I’d like to work on expanding this soon. Some more details and an example in this post last year. Micro.blog is small so it’s a good way to branch out.

A little surprising, Meta is expanding the Threads API. Might be time to consider doing more with it. Micro.blog can cross-post but only retrieve posts if the fediverse is enabled. Downside of doing more is jumping through the hoops of Meta’s approval machine.

Mac folks, any bugs you’ve noticed recently in the Micro.blog app? Fixing a couple little things for macOS 26 Tahoe beta.

Congrats to Manu Moreale on the 100th interview in his People and Blogs series! This one features Marisabel Munoz, who writes about her process of starting long-form blog posts by hand:

I use Moleskines (I prefer it due to the lines) and fountain pens—the ink’s flow slows my thoughts, helping me process them. Then comes the sculpting: what stays, what expands, what’s cut. It’s like editing, but not quite… more of a second draft.

I think I was subconsciously inspired by Federico Viticci’s post when I tried this prompt with ChatGPT Agent last night: I created book.micro.blog and www.manton.org. I want to look through longer blog posts (at least a couple paragraphs) on my blog that are about social me...

Big fan of Internet Archive. I’ve also been occasionally using archive.is. Handy for grabbing a snapshot of an article, even in some cases behind a paywall. I do pay for a few magazines and websites, but not everything on the web!

Jason Snell has a first look at iPadOS 26:

It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode, or via a single tap it can turn into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads.

Enormous piles of money just sound crazy. Google spending $85 billion on capital expenditures this year, or about double what Twitter was sold for. Those AI data centers aren’t going to build themselves! Meanwhile, the scale of the OpenAI’s infrastructure in Abilene is starting to come into focus.

Upgraded to the latest Tahoe beta and now a couple of apps seem to be confused. Nova thinks it’s expired. I have an older serial number, but they should work forever just without updates. I think something might be weird with the system keychain.

Lupe Tortilla. 🌮

Mastodon will experiment with donation banners:

The initial campaign will appear via a banner to people that use our Android and iOS apps, if they are signed-in to an account on one of our instances, and only if their account has existed for four weeks or more. The banner will be easy to dismiss, of course, and we will not continually prompt users to donate.

Patron supporters have declined over the last couple of years, so they’ve had to rely on larger donations. Makes sense to rebalance to lots of smaller donations.

Meanwhile, sticking to paid subscriptions for Micro.blog. It’s more stable.

I hate to add to the noise and news overload, but this article by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic is a good summary of Trump’s crazy rants over the weekend, posting dozens of times in just one day:

Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

He’s obviously unwell. Eventually he’ll be gone and we can start to pick up the pieces left by failed, vengeful administration. 🇺🇸